Abstract
Though written for political theorists and philosophers, Daniel Innerarity’s The Future and Its Enemies: In Defense of Political Hope (2012) is a battle cry – we must take the future seriously! – that transcends disciplinary boundaries, revealing a rapidly beating heart of much existential trembling. Innerarity opens with the simple observation that we have a poor relation with the future, based in fear, anxiety, excessive or insufficient worry, and a failure to predict or actively shape its emergence. Thus, Innerarity demands that all social theory ‘be a theory of time, specifically of the way we employ the future’ (2). One by one, the chapters problematize and call for change in the way we understand and relate to justice, decision-making, responsibility, and other aspects of social-political experience. The common argument of each chapter, however, is that democratic societies must reorganize their political activities in relation to the future. This reorganization relies on an openness and a hope informed by the acknowledgment that our complex future is not predetermined or trivial, as the naysayer enemies of the future would have us believe. Through this democratic reorganization, the future can be shaped in more stable, sustainable and just ways.
Innerarity suggests that we have a deeply problematic relation to the future, embedded in various social and systemic forces that confound our ability to treat the future as actually unknown and thus wonderful. In fact, ‘if there is true future’, Innerarity says, ‘we should be confronting something unknown and surprising’ (4). Throughout the book he tells us that various mistaken habits or ideals, which are championed by the enemies of the future, prevent us from having a healthy relationship with the coming unknown. These enemies of the future, Innerarity says, ‘are found anywhere the future is trivialized and amid those who promote unproductive accelerations with no concern for the costs of modernization’ (ibid.).
Included among these mistaken ideals is a demand for rapid and thus undirected innovation; near-sighted problem-solving that is exacerbated by a culture of instant gratification. Electoral cycles cause politicians to work for votes and thus focus on immediate consequences rather than long-term planning. We face a lacking sense of intergenerational justice, especially among older demographics. Interest groups generate organized pressure that influences political operations with little regard for our collective future. All of these build a sense of the future as a predetermined end, or a thing that does not matter because the present is now. And, the acceleration of social life leaves us without the time to sufficiently discuss, contemplate and plan for the future, thus we often feel fearful and alienated. The current vision of progress as acceleration is problematic because it lacks long-term planning and ends up looking more cancerous than progressive.
These ideals and habits are compounded at the political level by a right–left binary that places citizens in an antagonistic relation with each other, as well as with lionized politicians who are supposed to save us without our help. Subsequently, our democratic capacities are reduced to predetermined problems with predetermined solutions. This becomes painfully obvious around election years, when the same issues arise time and again, with the same rhetoric in response to those issues, making the world itself seem static beyond political decisions. Hence, politics as usual recklessly shirks the complexity of the future in part because it treats the world as predetermined, a repetition of the past, and reified, with an already known set of problems that can be worked on through the same tactics that have been used in the past. We can call the common political relation to the future a causal view.
The causal view of the future recklessly projects the past and present forward in at least two ways. The most general of all of these predetermined and causal relations with the future is the belief that it is an inevitability that will be realized through the expansion of sameness, the past projected forward. Another way that the causal model relates to the future is to disregard it as not mattering or as a thing that will somehow sort itself out. Certain market-based visions of progress function on this latter presumption, ultimately failing to address the complexity of the future by reducing political necessity to short-term and immediate material desire. Here, it helps to consider the increasingly exigent environmental problems that are, at best, being avoided by innovation through short-term solutions (i.e. cars that consume slightly less gas, or new ways of pulling oil from the earth that do not address the long-term threat of extreme global climate change).
Given a reified and causal relation to the future, political decisions become paradoxical: they are supposed to be binding, but at the same time they must come across as irrelevant because the future is already decided. Our current political relation to the future, therefore, leaves us stuck in a situation where the forces of reality seem ‘to conspire not just against the possibility of making correct decisions, but against the possibility of making any type of decision at all’ (49). The paradoxical character of political decision-making often leaves everyday people in a passive, powerless and terrified state, thus undermining democratic action in various ways.
Unfortunately, it is unclear whether or not we can fully escape a problematic and risky relation to decision-making, even when we treat the future as an open possibility. As the existentialists made clear, there is always some irrationality in rational deliberations – a leap of faith – and the way we prepare for the future is no exception. But, we must respond to the future and make decisions, regardless of how irrational choice may be, and so, Innerarity wants us to assume the ambiguity of our gloomy-seeming fate. He suggests we change our relation to the future, open and thus free ourselves from fear or disregard, by embracing an ethics and politics based in an active hope.
Innerarity maintains that a healthy relation to the future requires that we slow down in certain ways, engage in collective planning and, most importantly, open ourselves to an understanding of the future as undetermined, ambiguous and a thing that is not reified by the scripts given to us when we decide we are certain types of people (i.e. left or right). At the political level, democratic and rational planning for the future requires that we bracket or put aside our preconceptions, and embrace a politics of hope that imagines the world and other people as open possibilities. A politics and ethics of hope rejects the self-fulfilling pessimistic rhetoric that declares human nature is greedy and terrible, and the world naturally and inevitably takes a certain shape. Innerarity, along with other philosophers from various traditions, wants us to see the world as transforming, undecided and able to be reimagined in various ways.
It is incredibly difficult for individuals and political groups to open themselves in the way Innerarity imagines, thus the task itself will require time and great efforts. For example, in facing reality hopefully, there is always present within a risky decision the possibility of disappointment, failure and trauma. But, by imagining the world as already disappointing and terrible, or as already determined, and by facing our decisions with hesitance, fear, or disregard, we undermine alternative realities by already deciding that they are impossible. Facing the future through fear or disregard is itself an act that has important consequences.
Indeed, any action will have many untold ramifications, both narrowing and expanding the realm of the virtual. In a sense action forces the world to be one way and not another. Further, future generations have no say in this, so if we do not take careful steps to imagine what they want, or to leave them space to decide for themselves in relation to our decisions, then we are being violent. That is, by not facing the coming future as an open possibility or by facing it as already determined, one is acting with violence against the next generation by denying it the openness we would want for ourselves.
In other words, there is something deeply metaphysical at stake in the battle for the future and that is the realization that the complex systems within which we function cannot be predetermined, as complex systems theory tells us, precisely because they are so complex. Our response to this metaphysical problem takes us into the realm of ethics, insofar as we are collectively responsible for things to come, and Innerarity wants us to be fully present, not living in a bad-faith and pessimistic denial.
Of course, hope and ethical posturing alone will not save us, and so Innerarity calls for an increase in the work of futurology that would help us to rationally plan for and practically respond to the open unknown. We must minimize the risk of the choices we make, which involves learning to interpret the myriad social-political activities of our complex system in new ways. One example Innerarity discusses is a general lack of political participation, which he suggests may itself be a political statement that should be analysed and addressed in new ways, not merely disregarded as apathy.
Innerarity argues at greater length in his other works – specifically The Democracy of Knowledge (2013) – that democracy requires more complexity, new epistemic tools and approaches for analysing this complexity, all of which contributes to the more rigorous planning we need to move into the future. An increase in complexity is not merely useful for de-stabilizing predictions and predeterminations, but greater variation or pluralism affords decision-making in which more persons agree and in which greater variation in the future is secured. Similarly, by bringing more persons to the political table – through direct participation or more rigorous and accurate representation – and increasing the knowledge with which we work in our decision-making, what we can and cannot decide will become illuminated. With increased general and specialized knowledge available to inform our decision-making processes, new possibilities open. By increasing possibilities, we create a better relation to the future by expanding the number of potential worlds from which to choose. Which possible world we end up choosing ultimately rests in a democratic agreement, but this is radically divergent from a future that is already decided without our consent.
This hopeful theory, however, will be difficult for some to accept. It may be hard specifically for those persons who understand themselves as embattled in an ongoing struggle with a system that has not only failed to adequately represent, but has actively disabled, silenced and harmed. Here, one might consider South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an attempt to address this problem of historical and systemic violence. Based in Euskal Herria, Innerarity is no stranger to this embattled sentiment and the needs of repair. In these cases, the people have little hope or trust when it comes to institutional political activities.
The degree to which persons understand themselves as embattled can vary, ranging from armed struggle to the aforementioned right–left team-like animosity. Violent or not, the problem of integrating persons into a political system, of creating trust and a sense of collective ownership and responsibility, is, I think, the most difficult and pressing task of institutional politics. In situations of long-standing political violence and a schism between the people and the system, the problem of integration ends up being a problem of how our relation with the past informs our capacity to effectively move forward into the future.
In response to this problem, Innerarity returns to the metaphysical distinction he develops throughout the text. The common way of critiquing and predicting the future is through a logical and causal model, which understands the future ‘as a past time projected forward’ (41). The common approach takes the future to be a mere repetition of the past, the realization of a world where nothing is new, and thus ‘an interpretation of what is taking place as a repetition of that which is already known and proven’ (ibid.). Alternatively, Innerarity’s model of the future asks us to identify new possibilities, through a rigorous observation of the present, and with a disposition to act.
This hopeful suggestion is not itself a solution to the problems of the past, but it is an effort to open the possibility of dealing with those problems by no longer seeing them as strictly past problems. That is, by seeing historical wrongs as having real present and future consequences that can be addressed on their own terms, Innerarity loosens the grip of the past by leaving it for what it is, and asking us to work forward. In most cases this request to move forward will be met with demands of recognition. Historical memory will have to be addressed, especially in those systems where the predominant responses have been to treat the past as if it has already been dealt with because it is past or to pretend that no past wrongs occurred.
Innerarity offers a practical alternative to the model that ignores the past. By treating the past as past, he asks us to recognize that there are real problems we can deal with now that might be rooted in that unchangeable history and, most importantly, that the future of our functioning democracies depends on responsibly addressing these issues. The process of acting on the present as a new historical event is intended to prevent future crises and instabilities. We need to deal with our present for the sake of our future.
In The Future and Its Enemies Innerarity is framing politics as a ‘civilizing activity that serves to channel social conflicts in a reasonable way’ (98). His democratic and rational hope is based in a collective distribution of responsibility – a responsibility to prevent undesired futures through a forward-looking accountability – and thus a willingness to change course if the risk of our decisions ends up backfiring. Innerarity’s democratic theory is optimistic, participatory and fallibilist.
Innerarity calls for greater efforts in the field of futurology with the goal of assisting politics not simply to repair, but actively to shape our social-political spheres and help the future emerge in a desirable form. It cannot be expected that persons will be immediately converted to a politics of hope, especially given our culture of instant gratification. Repair and the shaping of a new political landscape will take time, but Innerarity maintains that we need to take the time to restructure our political activities in order effectively and ethically to bring about the future. Indeed, we need to synchronize our time – not just slow down, but understand and appreciate that there are many times, many experiences of time, many spheres of time where resources, problems and expectations can vary drastically. A democratic system that is unable to account for the complexity of real time will not be prepared for the future, nor will it successfully bring about a future that is desirable because it will ultimately fail in its purpose of representing and supporting the demos, thus failing to even articulate what a desirable future could or should look like.